Bed

Insomnia for a Better Tomorrow

First week of February you began to suspect that, for the rest of your life, nothing might happen. This was one of those years. You mail-ordered a special mattress, and napped too much. In restaurants, people ordered the icecream cake, shoved their hands under their thighs, and talked loudly about death. On TV, politicians began to snack from Ziploc bags, like a provocation. Almonds, raisins. Sour Patch Kids.

Things, you felt, had changed.

There was a new foreboding to the room in which you slept. There was the fear, now, that all your anxieties and disconsolations might keep on escalating and never stop. There was the theoretical chance that if you threw a banana at a wall the banana might go through the wall.

“Oh well,” Brian said. He had begun to order two coffees at once, two different flavors. “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t care.”

His girlfriend Chrissy sat opposite him in a padded chair. They were in a coffee place and there was a table between them. This was Manhattan.

“The key to coffee is to not care anymore,” Brian said. “Tolerance and addiction are wrong. They’re just wrong. You drink one cup, two cups, ten. Whatever. You keep going. Maybe in the end you’re up to fifteen cups, but you always feel good, until you die.”

“You’re ignoring the financials of it,” Chrissy said. She had a muffin and an herbal tea side by side in front of her.

“No I’m not. It’s the same,” Brian said. “You keep going into debt, buying whatever. You owe a hundred million dollars. Finally you die.” He was feeling a bit nauseated today. “You can’t argue this,” he said.

“By going into debt,” Chrissy said. “You’re hurting other people.”

“Credit card people aren’t people,” Brian said. “They’re credit card people.”

Chrissy moved her muffin away from her herbal tea. “You think you’re so cool,” she said.

Was she being hostile? Brian couldn’t tell anymore. Their love had been spent. Brian had spent it. There had been a sale at the mall, and Brian had brought coupons. “Buy things; we’ll make her better,” the mall had said. Brian had looked around a bit carelessly, without focusing on any one thing, but just making a vague sweep of it all. “Well, okay,” he’d said.

“You think you’re so wise,” Chrissy said. “You think you know more about life than the Dalai Lama or whoever. You secretly think that.”

“What?” Brian said. “Stop it. I’m just saying things.” He scratched the back of his neck. He looked at the muffin on the table. He began to say something that took a long time to say, but he didn’t know what it was, and no one else heard anything of it. His mouth moved, but no sounds came out, which could sometimes happen — you could speak and no sounds would come out.

There was a rumor that year, that you might not be yourself. That you might actually be someone else. One of those people who refuse antidepressants, who can’t hold down a job, who ends up sleeping, finally, in a hole.

That might be you, was what the rumor said.

People talked. They said, “There’s this rumor.…” Then they pointed out something amusing that was happening in the distance. They shrugged. Itched their forearms. They were easily distracted. Later on, though, in the mouthy dens of their bathrooms, they looked in their mirrors, and they just were not sure. Someone was there; but was it them? And so they believed. They said things like, “What does it even matter. I might not even be myself.” Then they threw themselves off a bridge, or else drank a quart of ice coffee and watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

One night, after sex, Brian had — instead of making the dash through the kitchen, to the bathroom — cleaned himself with paper towels, rolled over, and gone to sleep. Chrissy had shaken her head at that, had made an annoyed noise and then run through the kitchen and showered.

But soon after, she too began to use paper towels. And then when they ran out of paper towels, they started using toilet paper, and a couple of weeks after that they stopped having sex.

It had become, in too many ways, similar to going to the bathroom.

Now they hugged a lot but rarely kissed. They said things like, “Instead of saying ‘good night’ every night, let’s just assume that we want each other to have a good night. That way we don’t have to feel obligated to say it every night.” They looked into each other’s eyes, and they saw contact lenses — the seized UFOs of them, dumb and shunned as plates. They yawned. They yawned wantonly, without covering their mouths.

They were having a fight one morning in their kitchen, in Brooklyn. Chrissy had spilled orange juice on the floor and then tried to kick it under the refrigerator with her sandals. Brian had watched through the hinge-area of the bedroom door. Had then walked in asking Chrissy if she thought this was a farm. Had kept asking that.

“You’re like a cow,” Brian said. “Yeah you are. No, a boar. I mean a pig. You think this is a farm.”

“Brian,” Chrissy said. She tried to look languished and fading-away — something like a corpse sinking into a lake at night — but ended up looking trashy and depraved, like a hooker. “Hey,” she said. “You’ve never given me an orgasm.”

“What?” Brian said. “Listen to me. Same here.”

“What?”

“I never had an orgasm with you,” Brian said.

“You Brian — you idiot, I mean. I’ve seen evidence of it.”

“You believe everything you see? It’s my body and I’m telling you that I didn’t ever orgasm with you.” Brian turned and opened the refrigerator and stuck his head in.

“Fuck you,” Chrissy said. “Yeah you did.” At this point in their relationship, it was overridingly important to win all arguments. Things were somehow at stake. Chrissy picked up Brian’s shoes. “Look at me,” she said. “Hey. Come here.” She went to the window and opened it, held the shoes outside. Brian looked. His head had begun to hurt. “Admit it,” Chrissy said. “Or I’m dropping your shoes.”

“I don’t lie,” Brian said.

“I’m dropping your shoes.”

“Are you going to drop them,” Brian said. “Or just talk about dropping them?”

“No I’m not. I’m not that kind of person. What if I hit someone’s head? See, you don’t even know me.”

“You think you know you?” Brian said. “Chrissy, you might not even be yourself. Remember that homeless woman you wouldn’t give money to? Yeah, I saw that. Well you might be her. So fuck you.” He put his head back in the refrigerator, and grinned. Sometimes you had to be a little bit insane. You had to say, “Give me that. Let me do it.” You had to take things from the world and bend them and then put them back in the world, bent like that.

It had something to do with fear. You had to reverse things. Make the world afraid of you.

Chrissy moved home to the Midwest. They had lived previously in her apartment, paid for by her parents, and Brian now moved to Jersey City, which was the other Brooklyn.

He used his college degree and got a job at a magazine corporation.

There were rooms with desks and rooms with views, and they gave Brian a room with a desk. “All the rooms have desks,” they said. “It’s a joke. So keep your pants on. It’s all a joke. Everything. You, me, this room. This whole damn spinning-swaying, car-crashing world.”

That was the tone of the place.

Each morning, a girl named Jennika would enter Brian’s room with a list of tasks.

“Here’s your tasks for today, Brian,” she would say.

Brian soon developed a crush on Jennika. She had a face, had all the right angles. She was shy and intelligent. Or else conceited and slow. Still, they could be happy together, Brian guessed, if she were only willing.

“That’s a strange name,” Brian said one morning.

“Oh.” Jennika hesitated, then smiled. “Here are your tasks.”

“You usually say, ‘Here’s your tasks for today, Brian,’ ” Brian said. He sometimes had the feeling that he was doing something illegal, something that he might be incarcerated for; or else something illusory, something that produced results, but only in some other, parallel universe, something that, in this universe, just did not produce any results.

“I do. Yeah.” Jennika blushed. She turned to leave.

“Wait,” Brian said. “What does this company do exactly? What do we make?” He had been wondering. Had come to one conclusion that they were producing a magazine for robots — because robots, Brian knew, would one day conquer the world. Afterwards they would probably want to read magazines.

“We’re a magazine corporation,” Jennika said. A kind of gluey indecision began in her eyes, a slow and brainward strain — this sort of melancholy distortion. It made it seem like she was very uncomfortable being alive.

“Jennika is a good name.” Brian tried to keep his eyes very wide and friendly, but could feel that the rest of his face was changing. Maybe the strain was in his eyes and not Jennika’s. Moments like these, it was hard to distinguish between yourself and others.

Jennika started to say something. She stopped. Her face became a little grotesque, but she didn’t turn to leave. They looked at each other. There was a long silence. That kind of silence that keeps going, that you then resign yourself to — like taking a step, and your foot going down, going further, not touching floor, your face falling, your thoughts going, “The ground, where’s the ground, oh well, oh well …”

They didn’t talk to each other anymore after that.

After work, Brian would spend a lot of time — too much, he suspected — going around looking for a place to eat. It would often take up the entire night, like some kind of wan and moony quest, something shameful and cheaply existential. He would inevitably be unsatisfied, would regret not eating whatever other food — that eluding food of otherness.

In his apartment he would lie on his bed and allow himself some fantasies, which led mostly to masturbation, though it would also lead to list making — to brief, abstract moments when he would understand that he needed simply to do things and then his life would be changed.

Sometimes, unwilling to sleep into the sameness of tomorrow, he would shower and then go out into the night, hoping to fall in love, to be whisked away into that sort of a life. He would buy fey candies, and a sugary drink. When a car came by, he would fear a drive-by shooting or kidnapping. He stayed close to the street-lamps. To discourage hoodlums — there were hoodlums in this neighborhood, it was said — he walked slantly and often turned to cross the street eccentrically.

It was a little thrilling.

Eventually, though, he would become tired and disenchanted. He would go back to his room and feel as if an entire month was inside of him. He would feel big and emptied like that. He would have a stomachache. Nothing was going to happen tonight, or ever. He would shower. Brush his teeth. Lie on his bed, and go into a flat and perished kind of sleep, one in which all his dreams were fraught and blotched and melodramatic and loud, like watching a movie from the front row.

He began to doubt his ability to make friends. He began, as maybe a kind of detachment — or maybe a kind of antisocial sarcasm — to take things literally. What materials did one need in order to make a friend? Was this mostly a DIY thing, or could you pay someone else to do it for you, diligently and in one night, while you slept? He sometimes brought a second mirror into the bathroom and looked at his face from different angles. Was he ugly? How ugly?

He lay in bed, remembering past things from his life.

As a teenager, he made screaming noises at night in his room, like a deranged person. He threw his electrical pencil sharpener at the walls. His mother was downstairs in bed, crying a little, mostly asleep. Brian, in his room, felt as if he might explode, might already — in a slow and miniscule and lingering way — be exploding. He needed to explode. He lay there motionless, but he also lay there exploding. He smooshed his head into his mattress, making sounds like, “aaaghh,” and “ngggg,” and then went downstairs. He stood in the doorway of his mother’s bedroom. He started yelling things. His mother woke, warm and puffy from sleep, and — after Brian finished yelling — whispered that she was sorry for being a bad mother. Her face, ensconced in hair and pillow, was dramatic and friendless as something cocooning. She looked like a little girl, and Brian stood there, taking this in — trying to get at the meaning of things, to fit at once into his mind all the false and watery moments of his life. He stood there, and he looked. He looked some more. And then he went back to his room. He wrote down on paper: “Don’t hurt anyone again.”

But he did. He went on blaming his mother. Yelling at her. About how he couldn’t make friends, how it was because she spoiled him, didn’t ever punish him, didn’t put him into uncomfortable situations, didn’t socialize him, etc.

“Don’t hurt anyone again.”

Brian had a little stack of those papers somewhere.

And, finally, he had, recently, begun to do less of this hurting of other people, this blaming of others, of his mother. Though it was mostly because he did not see anyone anymore. Probably that was the reason.

At work, he stopped saying hi to people, unless they said hi to him first, at which he would then say hi eagerly back and try to smile. But he was not good at smiling. That ataxic struggle of the mouth, it sometimes felt to Brian like a kind of snarling. He could see it on other people’s faces, that he was not smiling, but probably snarling.

After a while, people stopped saying hi to him.

The work atmosphere became foretoken and noir, like a Batman movie.

Most days now Brian didn’t say anything out loud.

He took to sitting in parks. Observing people. Sometimes he would see a girl and a boy holding hands and it would make him happy. “How nice,” he would think. “How nice it is for them.” Though most of the time it just made him jealous. He imagined the couples coming up to him and patting his hair, slapping his cheeks, like a baby. Laughing into his face. He would dare them to.

He bought encrusted nuts from the “Nuts 4 Nuts” people, who were nice people, if a little doomed-seeming.

He made it a point to say thank you and goodbye whenever buying food or other items.

Have a good day. Goodnight.

One day he didn’t go to work.

And then it became so difficult and useless to go to work that he stopped going.

There were moments when you knew for sure that you would never be happy. You thought, “Nothing’s going to happen this year. Ten years, sixty years. That’s right. Of course.” And you felt all those years, there, inside of you, wandering the institutional corridors of your bones, playing ping-pong in the unkempt game-room of your heart, not keeping score, not even using the paddles — but playing stupidly a kind of handball-table hockey. But not even doing that, really. Just standing around. All the years, just standing there. Waiting to happen.

You thought, “Well, then …”

And you imagined being dead. You imagined it might be something like a gasp. A normal gasp, but sustained, and forever — and maybe outside of you, sucking at your air, the suffocation and discomfort increasing without end. The mouth-faced animal of death — flying, taking, wanting always more, like something intelligent and sane, but delinquent and two-years-old. The mouth-headed gliding lung of death. “Of course,” you thought. Because these things were possible. They were. There was even a thing called anti-matter, Brian knew. And black-matter, which was invisible. Eighty to eighty-five percent of all matter was actually black-matter. Brian had read that in a book. There had been an enormous question mark on the opposite page.

For a long time, there was the sensation of life becoming smaller.

Life lost gradually the things of itself. The peripheral items wandered amnesically off, and then flew away, not amnesic at all, just too optimistic and quixotic to stay. You became meeker and less opinionated through all the small maintenances of yourself — the self-aware, mid-day toothbrushing, the splashless handwashing. And the one eye of your soul — the angrysad Cyclops of your soul, with its spiked club, its dark and forsaken cave, its island routine — began to squint, to slowly close.

Life became a puny, disassembling thing.

Something that needn’t be paid any attention to — that you could just leave there.

Brian found that he did not need much to get through each day. Decent Chinese food, a Jean Rhys novel, iced coffee. That was enough for one day. It helped if he stayed in his room and slept more than 14 hours a day, which he did; the peculiar, detached success of being in bed — it was like the padded practice of a thing before the real hurt and triumph of the actual thing.

His fantasies became less masturbatory and more about time-travel and childhood.

He grew content in a leveled and agrarian way, like a grass.

Still, though, once, unable to sleep, he had, in one dilapidated night, allowed himself to search out an adult store and buy two porno magazines and some other items. He read them front to back, stopping carefully for the photos. Later, he looked in his bathroom mirror, pointed at his reflection, and said, “Born alone, die alone.” He was giddy with shame and despair after that. Then he wasn’t giddy anymore, and he went to sleep. When he woke, it was night again. He wrapped the pornography and the other items in three plastic grocery bags, tied it up, put it in a Mercer Street Used Books bag, tied that up, carried it six blocks in a direction he hadn’t been before, and shoved it in someone’s trashcan.

It was important, he knew, not to become one of those irrecoverable persons.

One day he was looking out his window, staring at people who were climbing onto each other’s backsides laughing — and he began to think that if he got a job, he could meet people. He seemed to realize this. He needed a job. He needed also to join clubs. Water polo, yoga. Bowling.

In Manhattan, he had a coffee.

He walked up Sixth Avenue. He turned toward Union Square. The streets seemed to have recently been blasted clean. “Nice job,” Brian thought. He was impressed. He felt good. He went through the park, looking and smirking — not in an unfriendly way — at people, and continued uptown.

Around 33rd street there was a strip club or something. It had a sexy-lady sticker on the door. It said, “Live Girls.” Brian thought of maybe going in. Maybe not, though. He would no doubt affect gauntness, perversity, desperation, and condescension. The other patrons would somehow affect virtue and dignity, a kind of Nordic diplomacy. They would be enterprising and pressed for time.

Brian walked into Times Square.

There was a Brazilian steak place here that he liked. He used to go all the time with Chrissy.

He walked back downtown. He didn’t feel at all good anymore. “Because of the coffee,” he thought. The caffeine was no longer doing what it would do. He sat in Washington Square Park. He had never liked Chrissy, he guessed. Had never really liked anyone, probably. “That’s it,” he thought. His shoulders and neck were cramped from trying too hard for good posture, which he knew was important for confidence, bones, self-esteem, mood, attractiveness, etc. A young man wanted to sell Brian some drugs. Brian shook his head, and looked at the ground. The young man stayed to talk. He sat. He made some distinctions between psychologists and psychiatrists, and then complimented Brian’s teeth. “He says that to everyone,” Brian thought. Next, your teeth would be pulverized to a fine powder. “Thank you,” Brian said, and the young man left.

It had become very dark outside.

Brian stood and walked in some vague direction, into a bookstore.

He moved himself around the aisles. He tried not to look too lonely. He opened a book but could not concentrate. Everyone else, he felt, was on a choicer plane of existence. They all seemed very confident that the world was a good and auspicious place. Brian’s face had gone hot and severe. The clam-meat of his face. People could see. His neck tremored a little. That kind of inchoate weeping that would always happen to him if he stayed in public too long, it happened now.

“This is … unreasonable,” he thought.

He bought and ate a cookie the size of his hand. He felt like vomiting. He went out into the city. It seemed louder than before. Trucks the size of small buildings were coming consecutively down the street. A team of men were jackhammering the street. There was a group of drunken people with glossy heads.

Brian walked slowly around, then came to a stop. His mind went blank. Time moved around him, like a crowd. “Walk,” he thought. “Move, go.…”

He thought that he would see a movie, then.

He bought a ticket for 12:45 a.m. at the Union Square Theatre. He had one hour. He walked in a direction, but saw an acquaintance across the street and turned and walked in another direction.

From a deli, he bought a 16 oz. beer and a soy drink that was also a tea drink.

Outside, he made sure to look far into the distance. If an acquaintance confronted him, started questioning him, he would have no choice but to run away. He sat in a dark area of Union Square Park.

He drank his tea drink.

He looked absently at the label. “2000 % Vitamin C,” it said.

In the movie theatre there were a few other solitary people. Some had a kind of space-time enlightened gaze, a beatific vacancy about their eyes that made them look very confident, but in a bionic way, as if they were truly — scientifically — simultaneously in the future, at home, eating something with a large spoon. The others, including Brian, blinked a lot. After each blink their focus would be on a different area outside of their heads. They looked as if under attack, which was because they felt as if under attack.

Brian went into the bathroom and stood in a stall.

He locked the door. He took his beer out of his bag, looked at his beer, put his beer back in his bag. He stood there until a few minutes past the start-time of the movie. He splashed water to his face, left the bathroom, went in the theatre, and sat in the back row.

After a while, he took his beer out of his bag and opened it. The beer said, “Kuhchshhh.” It was tall, silvery, and cold. On the screen, a beautiful girl who was Natalie Portman was taking an aggressive interest in a depressed, monotone man whose mother had recently passed away.

Brian almost shouted, “Bullshit,” but was able to control himself.

“My hair is blowing in the wind,” said Natalie Portman, whose name was Sam.

Brian began to think, “If I were as beautiful as her …” He stopped himself and drank his beer. His face soon became warm. There was an asphyxiative pleasure to it, like a kind of choking or crying. His heart was beating fast. The movie was wide and calm on the screen. Cool air was coming down. Brian leaned back into his seat and put his feet up. There were moments when you were not afraid of anything anymore. These moments it became clear that all things were arbitrary, that everything was just made of atoms, or whatever, and therefore everything was, firstly, one same, connected thing, a kind of amorphous mass wherein areas of consciousness moved from place to same place — or maybe did not even move, but, because all places were the same, were just there. Guilt, fear, meaning, love, loneliness, death. These words, you realized, were all the same. Everything was all the same. There was what there was, and that was what all there was; there was you, and you were everything. These moments would last seconds, minutes, or maybe an hour, and they were euphoric. They could happen from reading, looking at a painting, from music — from any kind of art, really, or from witnessing or experiencing something startling or strange; but never from other people. These moments you could almost cry. Life was simply, obviously, and beautifully meaningless.

Brian in the theatre that night, drinking beer, felt this.

These moments would end, though, when you realized that all that amorphous mass stuff was, well — bullshit. Was good on paper, maybe, but in real life was impossible. Unlivable. Something only a philosopher, a paid one — a philosopher that received cash for what he or she did — would benefit from. Things weren’t connected. Not really. You were one person alive and your brain was encased inside a skull. There were other people out there. It took an effort to be connected. Some people were better at this than others. Some people were bad at it. Some people were so bad at it that they gave up.